BAN X in Europe - Europeans against Elon Musk - Petition to the European Commission
ban-x-in.eu
This petition introduces the campaign for the ban of Elon Musk's social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) in the European Union.
  • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyzEnglish
    32·
    1 month ago

    I understand each government can have its own regulation about what websites should be accessible. I still don’t understand how Twitter operates in the EU. It’s a part of the world wide web. My understanding of how the internet works is that users reach out to the server, which in twitters case is in the US

    • towerful@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Twitter operates servers in the EU. They will have at least Frankfurt server. Probably UK and probably elsewhere.
      It’s geographically closer, so reduces latency and server load (faster to complete a request, faster to discard allocated resources).
      It also gives redundancy. If Frankfurt DC explodes, the system will fall back to the next closest DC (probably London).

      So let’s say that the EU DC stops existing. And requests go over the ocean to the US.
      Twitter still has customers in the EU. They are still making money from EU citizens. Because twitter isn’t free. It costs money to manage, develop and run. Twitter tries to recoup those costs via adverts and subscription services.
      So let’s say that twitter is no longer allowed to extract money from the EU. The EU bans companies advertising on twitter.
      Any companies that have business in the EU (like selling to EU citizens) are no longer allowed to advertise on twitter.
      Paypal, visa etc is no longer allowed to take payments from EU citizens for twitter services.
      Any EU service that has twitter integrations is no longer allowed to charge for twitter features.
      Basically, twitter has no way of getting money from the EU.

      Why would twitter spend money to access the EU population. It’s a cost sink. Dead weight.
      There is no growth. Getting 50 million new EU users means a massive cost increase.
      Plus paying for that extra load on (say) US based servers, and their international backbone links. (Just because you can reach a server on the other side of the world for “free”, doesn’t mean commercial services can pump terabytes of data internationally for free).

      So yeh, the servers could stay located in the US where twitter operations HQ is. Twitter could disband their international headquarters, so they no longer have companies in the EU.
      But they wouldn’t be able to get any money from EU citizens. And if they tried to circumvent the rules, then they can be blocked by DNS and BGP. So the only way to access twitter is by a VPN.
      That didn’t work well in Brazil, and twitter caved in to the demands of the Brazil government.